D
Denis Davidoff
Guest
The Engagement Metric Is Wrong for Wellness Technology
The tech industry has become exceptionally good at keeping people engaged. We extend sessions, build content loops, send notifications and remove natural stopping points. Then we measure the result in minutes, clicks and daily active users.
For social media or entertainment, that logic makes sense. For wellness technology, it creates a contradiction: what if keeping someone inside the product is the opposite of what the product is supposed to achieve?
A tool designed to support focus or recovery should not automatically borrow its success metrics from a social network. If the goal is to help someone pause, change pace and return to their day, a longer session is not necessarily a better one.
This question sits at the centre of how we are building ASHR, an interactive wellness product based on short experiences combining real-time visuals, spatial audio, movement and haptic feedback. The challenge is not simply to make the experience engaging. It is to make it useful without turning it into another product that constantly asks for more attention.
When Engagement Becomes the Goal
Engagement is not inherently bad. A product still needs to be useful, easy to understand and worth returning to. Completion rates, repeat use and time spent can all reveal something about the user experience.
The problem begins when engagement stops being a signal and becomes the destination. Once time spent becomes the main definition of success, product decisions tend to follow: more content, more choices, longer sessions and another recommendation before the current experience has even ended.
The product may grow while its original purpose becomes less clear. A wellness tool can start by helping people step away from digital noise and gradually become another content platform competing for their time.
For this category, the more useful question is not “How long did the user stay?” but “Did the experience help them achieve the outcome they came for?”
That question is harder to fit into a dashboard, but it is much closer to the reason the product exists.
Turning the Principle Into a Product
For ASHR, giving attention back is not only a communication idea. It affects the structure of the product: how long an experience lasts, how many decisions it requires, how its sensory elements work together and what happens when a session is complete.
The first principle is that short should still feel complete. An experience lasting roughly five minutes should not feel like a reduced version of something larger. It needs a clear entry, a meaningful transition and a natural ending.
Working within that limit creates useful discipline. Every visual, sound and interaction has to justify its place. Does it guide attention? Does it support the transition? Does it make the experience clearer—or does it simply add more time?
The product conversation shifts from “What else can we include?” to “What can we remove without weakening the experience?” That is a valuable question for many digital products, not only wellness technology.
Fewer Choices, Less Friction
Large content libraries look valuable because they communicate abundance. There is always another session, programme or recommendation to explore.
But abundance can become a burden when someone already feels overloaded. Before the experience even begins, the user has to choose what they want, decide how much time they have and compare several options.
The alternative is not to remove agency. It is to create a clearer path into the product. Instead of asking people to manage another catalogue, ASHR is designed to guide them into a focused experience for the moment they are in.
Sometimes, a product creates more value by asking fewer questions.
Technology Should Support the Experience
Real-time 3D, spatial audio, movement and haptic feedback can make a digital experience more immersive. They can also become layers of decoration that add novelty without improving the interaction.
In ASHR, these elements are intended to work as one system. Visual movement can guide attention, sound can create a sense of space, and haptics can mark a transition without adding another instruction to the screen.
The technology matters, but it should not become the subject of the session. The user should not have to think about the engine, production system or interaction model behind the experience. The result should simply feel coherent, responsive and easy to follow.
This creates another form of product discipline: a technical capability is not automatically a reason to use it.
The Ending Is a Product Feature
Many digital products do not really end. There is always another post, video, recommendation or notification. The experience continues until the user makes the effort to leave.
Wellness technology should make that decision easier. When a session is complete, the product should communicate completion instead of immediately turning a successful interaction into another opportunity for engagement.
For ASHR, the ending is part of the experience rather than an empty space after it. If the product has helped someone pause, change pace and move on, closing it is not a lost conversion. It is a successful outcome.
A product that respects attention should know when its work is done.
Measuring Value Beyond Time Spent
There is no single metric that can neatly replace engagement. A more useful picture has to combine several signals:
- whether users complete the experience;
- how quickly they reach the intended interaction;
- whether they return when the product is relevant;
- how they describe their state before and after a session;
- whether the experience feels clear rather than demanding;
- whether people choose to recommend it.
These signals are more complicated than counting minutes, and some are qualitative rather than numerical. But simple metrics are only useful when they measure the right thing.
The aim is not to eliminate conventional product analytics. It is to interpret them in relation to the job the product is meant to do. Five minutes can represent strong engagement if five minutes is exactly what the experience requires.
A Different Definition of a Successful Wellness Product
The wider issue goes beyond wellness technology. Every product metric contains an assumption about what good user behaviour looks like.
If success means more time spent, teams will design for longer use. If success means helping someone complete a specific transition, the product will be shaped around clarity, relevance and a natural ending.
That is the model ASHR is exploring: not technology that avoids engagement entirely, but technology that uses attention with a clear purpose. The experience should be compelling enough to work, focused enough to remain useful, and complete enough to let the user leave.
The next generation of wellness products may not succeed by capturing the largest possible share of a person’s day. It may succeed by making a small part of that day genuinely useful—and returning the rest.
This article was published under HackerNoon's Business Blogging program.